Quick Specs

Editors' Review

Duplicate File Eraser is a simple program that ostensibly finds and removes duplicate files. Although it's easy enough to find duplicates with the program, deleting them is another matter.

The program's interface is extremely plain, with all of the program's functions in view. Users first select the directory or directories that they want to search, then set a handful of other options, including whether or not they want to search subdirectories or include hidden files. The results appear in a separate tab, where users can select the files that they wish to delete. Actually deleting the files should be as simple as clicking the "Delete selected files" button, but it didn't work out that way. Clicking that button did absolutely nothing. We consulted the extremely brief built-in Help file; perhaps we were doing something incorrectly? If we were, the Help file had nothing to say about it. Thus, although we liked that the program provided some degree of search customization--users can select a file size limit, for example--the program failed to do that which is part of its name: erase files. We're afraid we can't recommend a program that gets something this basic wrong, even if it is otherwise easy to use.

Duplicate File Eraser is free. It comes as a ZIP file and installs desktop icons without asking, but it uninstalls cleanly. We do not recommend this program; while users could theoretically delete files by hand after finding them with Duplicate File Eraser, there are plenty of other programs that both find and delete duplicates.

I would give this six stars if you were able to add some granularity to the selection process. In my case, to choose the files that contained a dash instead of an underscore would have made the job even quicker.To rlwalker, unless your installation was hosed, you made some kind of mistake, either not selecting files or maybe a permissions issue? Hadn't thought about permissions, until now.

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